The World to Come
Dara Horn, 2006
W.W. Norton & Co.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393329063
Summary
A million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall is stolen from a museum during a singles' cocktail hour. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child prodigy who writes questions for quiz shows and who is sure the painting used to hang on a wall of his parents' living room. As Ben tries to evade the police, he and his twin sister, Sara, seek out the truth of how the painting got to the museum, whether the "original" is actually a forgery, and whether Sara, an artist, can create a convincing forgery to take its place.
Eighty years prior, in the 1920's in Soviet Russia, Marc Chagall taught art to orphaned Jewish boys. There Chagall befriended the great Yiddish novelist known by the pseudonym "Der Nister," The Hidden One. And there, with the lives of these real artists, the story of the painting begins, carrying with it not only a hidden fable by the Hidden One but also the story of the Ziskind family—from Russia to New Jersey and Vietnam.
Prize-winning author Dara Horn interweaves mystery, romance, folklore, theology, history, and scripture into a spellbinding modern tale. She brings us on a breathtaking collision course of past, present, and future—revealing both the ordinariness and the beauty of "the world to come." Nestling stories within stories, this is a novel of remarkable clarity and deep inner meaning. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Dara Horn was born in New Jersey in 1977 and received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 2006. In 2007 Granta magazine selected Horn as one of the Best Young American Novelists.
Horn's first novel, In the Image, published when she was 25, received a 2003 National Jewish Book Award, the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the 2003 Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The World to Come, published in 2006, received the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the 2007 Harold U. Ribalow Prize, was selected as an Editors' Choice in the New York Times Book Review, and as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle. It has been translated into eleven languages. Her third novel, All Other Nights, published in April 2009 was selected as an Editors' Choice in the New York Times Book Review.
Horn has taught courses in Jewish literature and Israeli history at Harvard and Sarah Lawrence College; she has lectured at universities and cultural institutions throughout the United States and Canada. She lives with her husband, daughter and two sons in New Jersey. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[T]he book succeeds, in part because Horn gracefully plays off certain words and images, using them as touchstones and leitmotifs: the title phrase and the Chagall painting; the recurring references to wombs, caves, bridges and the dents that angels supposedly leave beneath our noses. Little connections leap the narrative gaps and draw story lines together. Throughout this rich, complex and haunting novel, Horn reminds us that our world poses constant threats to the artist and to art, to the individual and the creative spirit. Their very survival is a miracle: in a sense, every one of us is that bearded man flying, unaware, over Vitebsk.
Susann Cokal - New York Times Book Review
Horn writes about theology and moral imperatives and the afterlife—as though she didn't realize that such things just aren't done in sophisticated literary prose. But that daring is endearing, especially when it flows from deeply sympathetic characters, an encyclopedic grasp of 20th-century history and a spiritual sense that sees through the conventional barriers between this life and the one to come—or the one before.
Ron Charles - Washington Times
Horn’s prose sallies along with confidence and intensity, sometimes to the point of whimsy, which means that the novel is, by turns, profoundly bleak and fantastically sweet... The World to Come is the stuff of dreams, enchanting and daring ... [Horn] has a spiritual and moral intuition that transcends most of her contemporaries. This is no mean feat—especially since she combines it with a flair for fantastical storytelling.
London Times
A deeply involving tale, a family saga and a mystery... brilliantly imagined... The novel may sound over-ambitious — pogrom and privation, familial and romantic love, life after death (and before), not to mention high art and quiz shows. And yet it all seems to work—beautifully.
Wall Street Journal
Isn't there a Willy Wonka gum that tastes like all good foods at once? If so, Dara Horn's The World to Come is the literary equivalent of that confection, equal parts mystery, sprawling novel, folktale, philosophical treatise, history, biography, love story and fabulist adventure... each page of her novel is a marvel.
San Francisco Chronicle
Horn's roving, kinetic imagination and storytelling talent are on abundant display here, and there's no question that this book is the real thing.
Chicago Tribune
Piercingly beautiful... delightful and often funny... Almost romantic, almost tragic, almost comic, almost mystical— the novel suspends us between emotions, never allowing any to become predominant, and we hang there in that indeterminate space, perfectly happy, hoping that the book will never end.
Newsday (Long Island, New York)
A deeply satisfying literary mystery and a funny-sad meditation on how the past haunts the present—and how we haunt the future.
Time
Former child prodigy Ben Ziskind-5'6", 123 pounds and legally blind—steals a Marc Chagall painting at the end of an alienating singles cocktail hour at a local museum, determined to prove that its provenance is tainted and that it belongs to his family. With surety and accomplishment, Horn telescopes out into Ziskind's familial history through an exploration of Chagall's life; that of Chagall's friend the Yiddish novelist Der Nister; 1920s Soviet Russia and its horrific toll on Russian Jews; the nullifying brutality of Vietnam (where Ben's father, Daniel, served a short, terrifying stint); and the paradoxes of American suburbia, a place where native Ben feels less at home than the teenage Soviet refugee Leonid Shcharansky. Ben's relationship with his pregnant twin sister, Sara, a painter who eventually tries to render a forgery of the painting to return to the museum, is a damply compelling exposition of what it means to have someone biologically close but emotionally distant. Horn, born in 1977, expertly handles subplots and digressions, neatly bringing in everything from Yiddish lore to Nebuchadnezzar, Da Nang, the Venice Biennale, recent theories of child development, brutal Soviet politics and Daniel's job as a writer for fictional TV show American Genius. Characters like Erica Frank, of the Museum of Hebraic Art, give tart glimpses into still-claustrophobic Goodbye, Columbus territory, which Horn then unites with a much grander place that furnishes the book's title.
Publishers Weekly
Horn's accomplished second novel (after the award-winning In the Image) reads like a dynamic hybrid of Nicole Krauss's The History of Love and Milan Kundera's philosophical flights of fancy. It is an artful exploration of a Jewish American family's Eastern European roots, a rumination on forgery in art, and an inventive exploration of the work of Chagall and the forgotten writings of his Russian compatriots. Finding himself alone after his divorce and his mother's recent death, Ben Ziskind distracts himself with work, crafting questions for a TV quiz show. When he decides to steal a Chagall painting that once belonged to his mother, his actions shake him from his hermetic shell. Flashbacks to Ben's past and to the lives of Chagall and his one-time novelist friend, the Hidden One, merge together. Horn deftly weaves an intricate story steeped in folklore and family secrets. Along the way, readers are offered glimpses of the possibilities, allegorical and otherwise, of life's beginning and end. This is intelligent, compelling literary fiction; recommended for public libraries. —Misha Stone, Seattle P.L.
Library Journal
A heist with a twist, Horn's engaging second novel (after In the Image, 2003) explores the history behind a stolen painting as well as the saga of the family that owned it for nearly a century. Recognizing it from his childhood living room, Benjamin Ziskind, a socially awkward quizmaster, lifts a million-dollar Chagall during a museum cocktail hour. We quickly learn that the master painter once taught art to Ben's grandfather in a bleak Russian orphanage in the 1920s. The piece, a sketch for the famed Over Vitebsk, was a gift from the artist to his young pupil. Of additional intrigue to the museum and eventually to Ben are a series of stories written by a legendary Yiddish author (and Chagall's onetime neighbor) that are hidden in the painting's frame. As Ben is pursued—not by the police, oddly enough, but by Erica Frank, a museum staff member—Horn shuttles readers through three generations of the Ziskind family, loosely following the painting as it changes hands, crosses an ocean and withstands enormous turmoil. The family history, and Ben's own covert investigation of the painting's place within it, uncovers questions of authenticity on multiple levels and leaves him (along with his twin sister and accomplice Sara) with a heavy moral decision to make. Despite the vast oscillations in time and place, the story is remarkably coherent, and it is only in the last 50 pages that Horn runs out of gas. The romance that buds between Ben and Erica is trite and seems tacked on to the otherwise finely crafted tale. And the author's reliance on symbolism and doubles, which is subtly effective throughout, becomes unwieldy. After an appealing journey into the past, Horn should have left her readers in the present; her final chapter is a confusing and corny look into "the world to come." An engrossing adventure, in spite of its flaws. Fans of art and Judaic studies will particularly enjoy this well-researched work.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The World to Come:
1. Start with the book's title. What is its meaning within the context of the novel? Describe in your own words "the world to come." How does it bind together past and present? Is it a vision that you can accept as your own...or simply as one presented by the author?
2. The painting at the heart of the novel is real: "A Study for 'Over Vitebsk,'" in which a bearded man moves "over the houses as if walking—unaware, in murky horizantal profile, that he was actually in flight." Talk about the painting's possible meaning—for art's ability to transport viewers. Might its image also suggest that the characters in this work (perhaps all of us) live magical lives without knowing it?
3. Considering your thoughts for Question #2, what do you make of a character's comment to Der Nister that art doesn't necessarily have meaning—"It's just color. And light. A little happiness. Do yourself a favor and don't beat it to death"? Do you agree with the remark? Does visual art lend itself to "meaning" the same way that writing does? Or is art's effect purely emotional?
4. What do you think of Ben Ziskind? Talk about his theft of the Chagall painting—is it "theft"? What prompts him to take it? Does he have a moral claim to it?
5. What is Ben's relationship with his sister Sara? Talk about her role with respect to the painting?
6. How does Erika Frank trace the painting's heist to Ben?
7. Readers have remarked on the book's otherworldly quality. Do you agree—if so, what lends it that quality? Where, or at what point, in the novel do you sense it most?
8. Dara Horn weaves folk tales into her narrative. Talk about the ways in which the tales are similar to art, even religion, in their opposition to a rational world—what we call "reality." Do you have a favorite tale from the book?
9. How does this work portray art as dangerous—for those who create it or own it? Why has art (visual or other) so often threatened the status quo of governments or society?
10. Also, consider art's uncanny ability (even if, or especially if threatened) to survive. Der Nister, for instance, hides his tales behind Chagall's painting.
11. Many have compared this work to Nicole Krauss's novel, The History of Love. Have you read Krauss's book...and if so, do you see similarities?
12. How would you describe The World to Come—as a mystery, heist story, family saga, romance, fantasy, historical fiction, or a philosophical / religious work?
13. Horn's novel moves back and forth in time and space— from the present, to Russia in the 1920s, and to Vietnam. She incorporates stories within stories. Does this structure enrich the narrative for you? Or do you find it irksome, disjointed, or hard to follow? In other words, how did you experience this novel?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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